


Wreath of Amaranth

by Ludovica



Category: Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Foursome, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 00:31:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ludovica/pseuds/Ludovica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, Elrond could not quite tell how they ended up in the private rooms of the royal couple, drunk with the Wood-Elves’ music and the strong Dorwinion wine Thranduil so favored, sprawled over the finest silk cushions and listening to the sweet voices of the Silvan Elves and the music of the trees sounding through the high windows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wreath of Amaranth

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Hobbit kink meme](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/1990.html?thread=1799366#t1799366/)

When it all started, Elrond and Celebrian had been married for not much more than ten years. They had traveled to Eryn Galen for diplomatic reasons, and also to introduce Celebrian to the still rather new King and Queen of the Woodland Realm. Elrond had considered Thranduil a friend since their days in Lindon, but had not seen him since the War of the Last Alliance.

Thranduil gave a feast in honor of the visitors. Later, Elrond could not quite tell how they ended up in the private rooms of the royal couple, drunk with the Wood-Elves’ music and the strong Dorwinion wine Thranduil so favored, sprawled over the finest silk cushions and listening to the sweet voices of the Silvan Elves and the music of the trees sounding through the high windows. He could not tell how it came that the Queen Farondiel herself was sprawled between him and Celebrian, how it came that her legs became intertwined with those of his wife, how her sweet, lilting words turned into little moans when the long, deft fingers of the new Lady of Imladris found their way under her light robes. He could not tell when her lips started to run over his naked shoulder, or when he had even gotten rid of his clothes. He could not tell how Thranduil’s hands found their way to Celebrian’s bosom, and he could not tell how it was that he hardly felt any jealousy at all. Though, of course, the soft body of Thranduil’s Queen pressing against his own might have been a part of the reason for his lack of indignation.

And then he didn’t care anymore about what he could and couldn’t tell. He weaved his fingers into golden and silver and strawberry hair, ran his hands and mouth over soft curves and lean muscle, tasted wine on the lips of well-nigh strangers, caressed skin without knowing who it was he was touching. There where tongues on his body, fingers on his skin, and moans in four different voices started to drown out the music from outside.

Their sounds didn’t fade for hours, it seemed. When they did, eventually, they lay in a pile of sprawled out limbs on the cushions, on top and below each other, hardly able to tell which leg, which hand, which head belonged to whom. Now they were drunk with bliss, with each other’s fragrances, with the sensation of soft skin.

It happened again the next evening, and the next and the one after that, until the wine was hardly more than a prelude. They did not do more than touching yet, though with hands as well as mouths, and still Elrond felt intoxicated whenever he lay on those cushions, when he got tangled in a web of arms and legs and shining blond hair in three different hues, when he felt his wife’s bosom against his arm and Thranduil’s arousal against his leg and Farondiel’s lips on his face.

When Elrond and Celebrian finally parted from the Greenwood’s royal couple, they parted like family, and not like mere noble guests.

~~~

The birth of their twins kept Elrond and Celebrian in Rivendell for a long time after this first visit in the Greenwood, and the tidings of the birth of Thranduil’s son made it certain that Thranduil and Farondiel would stay in their own realm for the time being.

When they came to Eryn Galen again, it was with their two adolescent whirlwinds in tow. Elrond’s councelor Erestor had told them enough stories about the Greenwood to whet their appetite for adventures in the never-ending woodland, and neither Elrond nor Celebrian objected to the idea of visiting their royal friends again.

Their welcome was cordial, and it turned out that Legolas, mere 20 years Elrohir’s and Elladan’s minor, had a very similar appetite for adventure as the twins. They let the Elflings roam the forest together, and Elrond was more than pleased to finally see them actually engaging with somebody else than each other.

As for the four of them now, they found each other in Thranduil’s bedroom again soon enough. But this time their convention was not rapture and inebriation like it had been at their first visit.

Now it was a game for them, a game that would last many rounds over the next near thousand years, a game that made them get to know each other to a degree Elrond could hardly ever have expected.

Again and again they would come to the Greenwood after this, and sometimes Thranduil and Farondiel would travel to Imladris, and their games got more sophisticated, more elaborate, more intimate with each and every visit.

~~~

More often than not, Celebrian was the one to take the reins during their encounters. Elrond had always known that she enjoyed being admired and in charge, a trait inherited from her mother, no doubt, and among the three others of their little group she was able to act on those desires. She had always been elegant and imperious in her demeanor, taller even than her husband, and her natural air of power made it easy to submit to her long-fingered hands and nimble mouth. Elrond and Farondiel (who had adored Celebrian since their first encounter) gladly accepted her lead from the very beginning, yet Thranduil offered her quite some resistance at first.

Elrond had to admit that it afforded him quite a bit of pleasure to see his wife take down the powerful King of the Woodland Realm between the sheets. To be fair, though, Thranduil didn’t stand a chance against Celebrian’s commanding voice, impressive strength and iron will.

Of course, Thranduil soon learned what joy could come from submitting to her. As much as she loved to be worshipped by her three subjects, she also loved to explore the three of them, to find out whatever made them moan, writhe or go mad with lust under her hands. She was a force of nature during their encounters, a golden beast, a licentious deity – and she lavished her blessings upon her believers like the summer rain did upon parched fields.

~~~

Where Celebrian was adamant seduction and delightful conquest, Farondiel was playful laughter and sensual joy. She was Silvan of origin, a descendant of the inhabitants of the Greenwood who had lived there before Thranduil’s father had founded his kingdom, and she still spoke with a trace of the Wood-Elf accent, a sweet, foreign sounding lilt which turned into clipped, indistinct babbling in the throes of her passion.

She was as much a part of the wood as the trees themselves, and at times she could be just as feral, enigmatic and capricious as her home. Her skills as a hunter were so renowned that even the name Thranduil had given to her at their wedding meant ‘huntress’, and not few of her people claimed that she could shoot a sparrow in full flight over the East Bight while standing on the top of the Greenwood mountains.

Farondiel was a maidenly beauty with strawberry blond hair and green eyes, the smallest and lithest of the four of them, yet also the most wanton. Her appetite for carnal pleasures matched her husband’s desire for jewels and wine. She liked to make herself everybody’s plaything - especially Celebrian’s, who she smothered with kisses while the fingers of the Lady of Imladris measured her body like a map of unfathomable value, mountains and plains and swamps alike.

Though for all of her lustfulness, Farondiel was a teaser just as well. Tantalizing her husband seemed to be one of her biggest joys. And so it did happen not too infrequently that Farondiel would forbid both Thranduil and Elrond to touch her or Celebrian while Celebrian spread her legs and sent her bucking and rearing by virtue of her tongue and lips.

It was torture, watching them and not being allowed to do anything, but both Elrond and Thranduil followed Farondiel’s orders, and Elrond was more than proud when he noticed at one point that Celebrian was using techniques on Farondiel which he had shown her (and which caused Thranduil to raise his eyebrows in astonishment).

~~~

Thranduil now was a king as much in the sheets as he was on his throne. And while he did submit to Celebrian and let his Queen her will, he still made sure to keep a certain amount of control over the situation. And since Elrond was the only one clearly below him in their little hierarchy, he especially enjoyed reminding him of his ‘place’. However, Elrond was not one to easily submit. He frequently played with Farondiel in very similar ways as his wife, though Celebrian and Thranduil would most often be involved in these dalliances. And while he submitted to his wife happily by virtue of her exquisite dominance, and the fact that he loved her more than he could ever love anything else, he did not really see any reason why he should just accept a position under Thranduil.

Though, as it turned out, Thranduil enjoyed it greatly to just make him assume such a position. He was strong, and he did not always fight fair either, and often he would make a show for their ladies of subjugating his half-elven bedmate. He enjoyed wrestling Elrond down on his knees and whisper provocations into his ears while he took him, painfully slow and painfully gentle.

Yet on rare occasions Elrond managed to push Thranduil below him. And when he took his prize for conquering the body of the Woodland King, he was neither slow nor gentle.

And even though he kept trying to fight Elrond off, Thranduil’s moans proved just how much he enjoyed those rare occasions.

~~~

As for Elrond himself – he was in quite a few ways exotic to the three of them. Not only was he the only dark-haired one in a bed full of blondes, but he was also the only one without pure blood. And as a Half-Elf, he was subject to some restrictions.

One of the things that were most obvious to the other three, of course, was the fact that he did not have as much stamina as any of them. And it fascinated the royal couple of the Woodland Realm in particular how he could not just go on and on and on for hours and actually needed breaks between two bouts.

Celebrian, of course, understood the differences of her husband to other elves better than Thranduil and Farondiel, but she still loved to boast with her exotic husband, with his dark hair and his just ever-so-slightly human features, and even though she knew about his low stamina, she loved nothing more than to tease him about how much her touches affected him – after she had been stroking him for an hour without letting him get to his release.

And while the novelty of this ‘discovery’ wore off rather quickly, they still used this weakness of his to their amusement. Elrond did not particularly mind, though – he developed a kind of masochistic streak between those three devils, and after a while he actually enjoyed it when they just ignored his peaks and kept going, and he even started to like it when they kept him on edge for hours in order to teach him what a ‘real Elf’ was capable of.

~~~

Even for Elves, a thousand years were a long time. And while they watched their children grow up, the four of them became family for each other. They might meet only once in a century at times, but they became steadily more skillful in telling another’s thoughts, another’s desires, another’s fears. They were comfort to each other, while they had to maintain their power with masks of unfazed noblesse, regal strength and sober circumspection.

Then, darkness fell over Eryn Galen.

Elrond’s and Celebrian’s last visit to the Greenwood had been just at the beginning of the Darkening. They were not Wood-Elves and had not spent many years under the rich green canopy of the Greenwood, and when the Silvan Elves pointed out the change in the trees and the air, they were slow to actually notice it.

They did notice the change in their hosts, though.

Farondiel was tense and distant, and it took the both of them aback, since they had only ever known her as untroubled and bold. Not once before had she looked at any of them with anything even close to disapproval, yet when Celebrian tried to distract her from the change of the wood with idle banter, she shot the Lady of Imladris a look of pure scorn that righteously horrified Celebrian.

Thranduil was tense as well – yet not irritable as his wife, but outright tired with worry. There was a tense edge around his mouth, a weariness in his eyes, a stiffness in his body that Elrond had never seen before. He did hardly talk at all during their stay, and when he did, he was curt and dismissive. The royal couple did not invite their guests to their chambers, and Elrond and Celebrian had to admit that they were not too discontented about that. For the first time since their first visit, they really, truly felt like strangers in the withering Greenwood.

They did not stay very long, and when they left the forest and rode over the Gladden Fields, Elrond bid farewell to the Greenwood. Later he could not say why he did so, but for some reason he felt that Eryn Galen was about to fall.

~~~

The next time they heard news of the King of the Woodland Realm and his people, Greenwood the Great had been given a new name: Taur-e-Ndaedelos, the Forest of Great Fear.  
Mirkwood.

~~~

Thranduil had built a stronghold for his people when the darkness had consumed the wood completely, halls and caves carved below the darkness of Northern Mirkwood, modeled on the halls of Menegroth, Thranduil’s past home. When they came to visit him the next time, witnessing the decay of the forest with their own eyes, Celebrian was hardly able to set foot into the cave system without shedding tears. She was a daughter of Lothlorien, and never had she seen such devastation, such despair before.

And neither had Farondiel.

The Queen, her heart still bound to the wood, her soul one with the trees, had started to fade – it was obvious for Elrond, even though Thranduil seemed to be in denial about it. Now that he was living under the surface, his feasts were even grander than they had been in the heyday of the Greenwood. Loud music, exuberant laughter, vinous song sounded through the halls of rock, while the Queen of the Wood-Elves sat in her chambers, surrounded by all the jewels and gold Thranduil could find for her, and withered in speechless misery.

~~~

Farondiel departed from the haven of Edhellond in the following year. Her eyes had turned dark gray with grief as she stood on the pier to make her farewells; her strawberry blond hair had thinned and lost its luster. Her skin was like parchment, tender to the touch, clinging to her bones. She had always been small and slender, but now she looked frail; as if a breeze could blow her out over the endless sea.

She did not kiss her husband or her son when she bid them goodbye. She hardly looked them in the eye when the tips of her delicate fingers touched their hands, and she even recoiled from the hug of her son.

Elrond and Celebrian had come to the haven to take leave of their friend, and their children had accompanied them, to care for their childhood friend after the loss of his mother. Just before Farondiel embarked, she halted a last time and turned around to the Lord and Lady of Imladris, nodding a faint farewell, though Elrond was sure that her eyes had lingered on Celebrian alone, who tried to be strong for her friend and hold her tears back. And while she did so better than Legolas, Elrond could still feel her hand tremble when he gently took it in his.

They comforted Thranduil in the following night. It was not a game this time; just gentle hands, warm bodies, whispered oaths of allegiance. They were still here, they said, they were not gone; and he still had his son, they said, his people. He was not alone. He would never be alone.

~~~

Rivendell was Elrond’s haven, even more so when the darkness started to rear its ugly head at Middle Earth again.

And never would he have thought that his biggest misery, his deepest agony, could find him in his beloved, hidden Valley.

When Elladan and Elrohir brought Celebrian to him, mortally wounded and tortured by black claws, he felt as if the mountains around the valley collapsed and crushed his home, his life, his soul under their unyielding weight.

With the utmost effort, summoning up all of his proficiency in the art of healing, he tore his wife off from the threshold of Mandos’ Halls. Nights after nights he spent beside her bed, holding her cold hand, watching her troubled face, waiting for her to wake up. The wound the Orcs had inflicted on her had been poisoned, and the skin below her rips had turned greyish green around the scar that remained despite Elrond’s best efforts to obliterate it with salves and tinctures.

He had not slept for nights on end, not able to leave Celebrian’s side and too distraught to find sleep anyway, when his body finally gave in and he fell asleep in his chair.

He woke up to a gentle hand stroking his hair, and when he opened his eyes, Celebrian was looking up at him. Her eyes were still fever-bright, but her breathing was normal, and her mouth even formed a little smile when she saw that he was awake as well.

Elrond was overwhelmed with happiness to see his wife awake, and he let her smile kindle his hope, his hope for a bright future, his hope that everything would be well again, that the mountains would stay in their place and Imladris would stay their haven.

But her faint smile was not the beacon of light at the end of a tunnel of despair, as he had hoped it to be.

Her sickness was not rapid despair, as Farondiel’s had been. It was more a nagging woe than consuming anguish, but still it slowly ate away her joy, her light, darkening her bright eyes and weakening her once vibrant body. She stayed a caring mother, a loving wife and a considerate ruler, yet Elrond could not help but notice that only a part of her was with them at any given moment; another part of her, a far more important one, kept withdrawing from Elrond’s touch, from Arwen’s smile, from Elladan’s laughter and Elrohir’s tales. She walked through the halls of Imladris without seeing the murals that had made her marvel when she first arrived in the Last Homely House. She laughed at the warriors’ jokes without understanding them. She lauded the minstrels for their songs without listening to them. She kissed Elrond out of habit, gave him empty smiles, looked at him with distant eyes.

Finally she told him that she wanted to go to the West, for Middle Earth had ceased to give her joy. In a bizarre way, Elrond was glad to hear about her decision. He had witnessed his wife die twice, on her sickbed first, and in the abyss of her sorrow later, and even though the thought of subsisting without her tore his heart into pieces, he could not bear to watch her die any longer.

And if she went to Aman, he would see her again one day.

She departed on a warm day of late spring. Galadriel and Celeborn, and some of those Celebrian had known in her youth, had come from Lorien to bid her goodbye; and Thranduil and Legolas were with them at the Grey Havens as well. Celebrian’s farewells were merrier than Farondiels. She kissed her children’s brows and her husband’s lips for the last time, hugged her parents, her childhood friends, her remaining friends from Imladris (she was taking six of her closest friends with her) and their guests from Mirkwood as well.

Then she embarked and waved them farewell from the rails, her smile finally earnest again.

~~~

Thranduil came to his chambers that night. They sat in silence near the fireplace, for hours, until Elrond stood up and walked towards his bed, undressing on the way. Thranduil followed him soon, and they lay together a last time, slow and gentle and in near absolute silence with the exception of a low moan once in a while, and they remembered the days when two pairs of bright eyes would have been watching them…

~~~

The darkness upon Middle Earth lingered, and grew.

And the sickness fell upon Elrond, as it had upon Celebrian and Farondiel before.

He grew tired, first. Tired and weary of most everything around him. He even started to grow tired of Rivendell, of his beautiful Imladris, his haven, his home. But at first his friends could still cheer him up; his children could still make him smile and laugh. There was still light in Middle Earth, and he still took joy in it.

But the darkness grew and grew and grew, and finally it was so close to consuming all of Middle Earth as it had not been since thousands of years. Elrond’s tiredness mixed with fear, with horror when he looked at the faces of his children and imagined them falling prey to this resurrected evil.

And they indeed fell, yet not to Sauron’s claws. His sons grew wrathful because of their mother’s fate, and their thoughts were consumed with revenge. They stayed on their hunts for months sometimes, once for a year, slaughtering whatever Orcs and other vermin they could find. Their hearts grew wild, and at times Elrond even noticed cruelty in their bearing.

Yet he closed his heart to those changes in his sons, and he treasured the images of their laughing faces, praying for the day he might see the joy they once knew again in their eyes.

Arwen fell as well. Not to wrath, though. Maybe it would have been easier for him if she had fallen to wrath. But no, she fell to love, for the child he had raised as Estel, and who grew into the Man named Aragorn, to be crowned King Elessar when the darkness would finally be vanquished.

Grief mingled with his tiredness and fear when he saw his daughter pine after a mortal, a king without a crown. He had set Aragorn near impossible tasks before he would give him his daughter’s hand in marriage, but Aragorn had exceeded even Elrond’s wildest expectations, and his wildest fears.

He lost Arwen when Middle Earth at last regained its light, and with his daughter, his last joy in Middle Earth was gone.

He resented Thranduil’s absence at Arwen’s wedding, and he resented his absence when he finally embarked on one of the Grey Ships himself. He took his farewells from all that he had known and loved, from his children and the last of his remaining friends, from Imladris, his home, his haven, from beautiful Middle Earth…

And the ship set sail, and their destination was Aman.

He would see Celebrian again, and he would bring Farondiel news of her son and her husband and her people.

He watched while the shapes of his sons, his father’s wife, his last loved ones vanished in the distance, praying that they may join him soon in the undying lands.

And he thought of Thranduil, of his crystal eyes and his silver hair, of the gentle strength of his hands and the taunting whisper of his voice.

And he sent a thought over Eriador and the Misty Mountains, through the revived splendor of the resurrected Greenwood to the Halls of Thranduil, King of the Woodland Realm:

_We will be waiting for you._


End file.
